Joe, a student at the Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, sends the business plan for his senior project proposal to local and national foundations. He needs to raise $5,000 so that he and his Vietnam War-veteran father can travel together to Vietnam to visit the places where his father fought and engage in reconciliation activities with the Vietnamese people. Joe will document the trip in video, audio, and a journal and then publish the story of the trip on his Web site.

The high school experiences of Stephanie, John, and Joe are vastly different from those of their peers at most comprehensive high schools. These students attend innovative high schools created through partnerships of educators, business leaders, and parents. Unlike traditional high schools, where students choose either a college-bound or general curriculum with compulsory core courses and a few electives, these schools offer an individualized education based on each student's interests and consultation with each student's teacher/advisors, parents, and workplace supervisor/mentors.

This article profiles two of these schools—New Technology High School and High Tech High. The third school—the Met—is described in detail in the article “One Kid at a Time” by Eliot Levine (p. 29).¹ 

New Technology High School

New Technology High School (www.newtechhigh.org) is the brainchild of local educators, business leaders, and parents who responded to the need for a high-tech workforce in the Napa Valley. The school opened in 1996, serving 220 students in grades 11–12 from two feeder high schools in the Napa Unified High School District and from several surrounding districts. Parents and students in these districts are informed about New Technology High School through promotional mailings and five parent information nights each year. Students apply by providing an application and a personal essay and are selected by lottery from a pool of eligible applicants. Entrance requirements are a 2.0 grade point average and completion of 9th and 10th grade courses for graduation.

New Technology High school looks like a workplace, not a school. The school's director and principal, Mark Morrison, calls it “a high-tech, high-touch learning environment.”

Technology is integrated into every class, courses are interdisciplinary and project-based, and each student graduates with a digital portfolio. In a course called New Media, students learn how to use powerful authoring and presentation technologies, which they apply to all their work. In the senior year, each student does a yearlong internship at a local business, many of them technology-related companies. Students also complete an online internship project summary that describes their experience and becomes part of their professional digital portfolio.

High Tech High School

San Diego's High Tech High (http://hightechhigh.org) is now in its second year. A San Diego Chamber of Commerce task force that included more than 40 public and corporate partners conceived and launched the school to respond to San Diego's transformation from a military-dominated economy to a high-tech regional economy. For two years, the task force developed the plan for the new high school around the principles of personalization, intellectual mission, immersion in the adult world, and performance-based student work and assessment.

A public charter high school, High Tech High has a diverse student population that mirrors the San Diego Unified School District. The school opened with 200 students in 9th and 10th grades. It now has 300 students and will reach 400 students in grades 9–12 at full enrollment next year. Students in the 8th grade from throughout San Diego apply for admission and are selected by lottery. High Tech High mounts a significant recruiting campaign in San Diego's poorest neighborhoods to achieve diversity.

When you walk into High Tech High, you feel as though you're in a workplace. The main section of the school, the Great Room, features student workstation suites under a high ceiling. Classrooms, which the school calls seminar rooms, look different as well, with comfortable furniture that can be rearranged easily and Smart Boards on the walls. You rarely see teachers lecturing in this environment; instead, you see students presenting their work and ideas.

Four physical structures provide a sense of place and identity to High Tech High students:

• Workstation suites, where each student has a personal computer;
• Project studios, where students work in teams to plan and construct 3-D models;
• Construction labs (a biocom technology lab, animation lab, and engineering lab); and
• Meeting/presentation spaces for visiting lecturers, mentors, and site supervisors.

Personalizing Students' Experience

At these innovative high schools, students are deeply engaged in their learning and held responsible for their own education. The small size of the schools means that adults and students get to know one another well. Personalization is further enhanced by advisory groups, in which a teacher/advisor works with the same 12–20 students, their parents, and their mentors for the length of the students' stay at the school.

Students at High Tech High and New Tech High take required courses in math, science, English, history/social studies, and foreign languages that meet the admission requirements of the University of California. Incorporating these requirements and building on individual interests, each student has a personalized learning plan that follows a “plan, do, and review” model. Teacher/advisors meet two or three times a year in conference with each student and his or her parents and workplace mentors to create the student's personalized learning plan, including projects, courses or seminars, college courses, and internships. The plan includes goals and timetables. Follow-up conferences are held to review and assess student performance.

The following program elements also contribute to the personalized approach of these schools.

Projects

Student work is built around short- and long-term projects to encourage in-depth work. The New Technology High Web site calls project-based learning

the backbone of the school's unique learning environment. Instead of handing out daily assignments, teachers assign periodic projects with different components. Components may include a written essay and a digital project, such as a Web site, PowerPoint presentation, or photo essay. Finally, students are asked to present their work orally to their classmates. Students work on these projects either individually, with a partner, or in a group.

Digital Portfolios

Key to the student-as-worker model at these schools is the digital portfolio, which provides the structure and repository for student work. According to portfolio expert David Niguidula, the digital portfolio is a software tool

that can help students create a “richer picture” of their skills and accomplishments than traditional transcripts allow. . . . By providing a more thorough documentation of how students are reaching goals, it can give a school better information on how to help individual students and the school as a whole.² 

Students build digital portfolios and publish them on the schools' Web sites. Portfolios include a personal statement, a current and sometimes a future résumé, student projects and work samples, contact information, internship reflections, letters of recommendation, and assessments. At High Tech High, the portfolio also contains a Spanish version, “Mi Mundo.” New Technology High School, which pioneered the development of digital portfolios, proudly exhibits the best student portfolios on its Web site (www.newtechhigh.org/School/Students_parents/portfolios.asp). These digital portfolios are much more than archives, according to California State University-Monterey Bay Professor John Ittelson, who is studying the new role of portfolios in high schools and colleges:

They are exhibits of living documents and integrated projects that drive the self-motivated student of the new millennium.

Exhibitions

At each of these schools, students periodically display and exhibit their projects to their parents, their peers, and the community in public exhibitions. The exhibitions often occur at key transition points, such as the end of the trimester, to motivate students and structure their work. Successful exhibitions are also required for advancing to the next grade and for graduation.

Internships

For students at these reinvented high schools, an internship in the workplace or in the community is the cornerstone event that differentiates their high school experience from that of their peers in comprehensive high schools.³  A typical student refrain is, “I never felt as respected as I feel in my internship.”

Student interns at these schools contribute as members of project teams, working closely with adults of all ages. The students exercise high-level technical, cognitive, and communication skills; solve real-world problems; and build a one-on-one mentoring relationship with their mentor/supervisor. They then reflect on their experience through writing and multimedia projects, which they often present to their project teams. Students intern at high-tech companies—as New Technology High School student Stephanie did—or at hospitals, financial institutions, and other workplaces. They also intern with working artists, design professionals, and video producers. Internship placements are made on the basis of student interests. Some internships require a few afternoons a week for a year; others are as short as three weeks but are full-time.

Technology's Role

Many believe that technology can best play a role in customizing education by delivering a curriculum product to students that fits their individual skill levels—for example, through tutorials or computer-assisted instruction. The kind of customization exemplified by these schools, however, speaks to a new paradigm, where students are agents of their own learning. Technology supports this new paradigm by giving students powerful tools to develop their learning goals, plan their projects, and create and present their products.

Technology has already proven its role in increasing productivity in the U.S. workplace. During the 1990s, the U.S. economy experienced significant gains in productivity. Most economists, including Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan (1999), credit technology as the foundation of this gain. This had not been the case in the 1970s and 1980s, when reports found a productivity paradox where technology investment led to no appreciable productivity gains (Brynjolfsson & Yang, 1996).

What was different about technology in the 1990s? Key differences included a critical mass of users, more advanced personal work applications, enterprise-wide applications, and, most important, widespread use of e-mail and intranets for work and corporate communications. Not only did individuals become more productive, but also communication and collaboration built community and lessened the need for middle management and supervision. Both of these factors made organizations more efficient and contributed greatly to the productivity surge.

Many schools and school systems may just now be reaching a similar take-off point. New Technology High, High Tech High, and the Met are already there. Technology supports every aspect of these schools' programs and design. Each school has close to a 1:1 computer-to-student ratio. Students use a wide array of technology applications to do their work:

• Word processing to write papers and journals;
• E-mail communication to consult experts and partners and to send work to their project teammates and their teachers;
• The Internet for investigative research;
• Multimedia tools to create online multimedia documents and Web sites; and
• Video tools, including digital cameras and video-editing labs.

High Tech High's CEO and principal, Larry Rosenstock, says, “Technology is not studied as a subject; rather technology tools, both 2-D and 3-D, are ubiquitous and used for producing—making, shaping, and forming.” According to Rosenstock, a school slogan is “You can play video games at High Tech High, but only if you make them here.”

The New Student Workplace

The adult workplace of the 21st century is project-based. Employees work individually and in teams. They write memos, create PowerPoint presentations, and publish Web sites to present their plans to their coworkers, their managers, their clients, and their professional communities.

High Tech High, New Technology High, and the Met are, above all, workplaces for students, similar to today's adult workplaces. These small high schools give students spaces to work in and learn—individual workstations/cubicles, project rooms, presentation rooms, advisory rooms, and real-world workplaces—and technology tools to do their work, to learn through projects, and to turn projects into products that they can exhibit and share with others.

The U.S. Department of Education has recognized New Technology High School as a New American Small High School, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded grants to New Technology High, the Met, and High Tech High to replicate their small high school designs across the country. Unlike today's comprehensive high schools, these new high schools customize and reinvent the high school experience and provide students with the work space and technology tools that they need to do their work.

References

Brynjolfsson, E., & Yang, S. (1996, February). Information technology and productivity: A review of the literature. Advances in Computers, 43, 179–214.

Greenspan, A. (1999, June 14). High-tech industry in the U.S. economy. Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress. Available: www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/Testimony/1999/19990614.htm